writer John Steinbeck said: “It is a common experience that a difficult problem at night is solved in the morning after the sleep committee works on it.” Many people claimed that they formulated breakthroughs and innovations in dreams. Recent research on sleep science suggests that these claims are supported by modern science.

A. 2024 survey suggests that sleep can help us make more rational, informed decisions and avoid being influenced by a misleading first impression. To demonstrate this, researchers at Duke University in the US had participants take part in a garage sale game. In the experiment, participants went through virtual boxes containing unwanted goods. Most of the items in the box weren’t worth much, but a few special items were more valuable. After searching through several boxes, participants were asked to choose their favorite box and would win a cash prize equivalent to the value of the items in the box.

When participants had to decide on a box immediately, they tended to evaluate the boxes based on the first few items rather than their entire contents. In other words, these participants were overly influenced by the initial information they encountered and did not incorporate later information into their decisions.

When the participants slept and made their decisions the next day, they made more rational choices, and the location of the valuables in the box did not seem to affect their decisions.

Problem solving in the sleeping brain

When we get stuck on a difficult problem, it can feel like we’ve reached an impasse. A study conducted in 2019 They found that when they gave the sleeping brain clues about an unresolved problem in the form of sounds, it helped participants solve that problem the next day.

In this experiment, participants were given a series of puzzles to solve. A unique sound was played in the background while solving the puzzle. At the end of the testing session, the researchers collected all the puzzles that the participants could not solve. While the participants slept, the researchers replayed sounds related to some of the unsolved puzzles.

The next morning, participants returned to the laboratory and tried to solve the puzzles they had failed to solve the night before. Puzzles that were given clues throughout the night had a higher solving rate; This suggests that sound cues trigger the sleeping brain to work on a solution to that puzzle.

One of the ways sleep can help us solve problems is discovering insights Relationships between objects and events. A. study published He tested this idea in 2023.

The researchers had participants learn the relationships between four different items (an animal, a location, an object, and a food) related to an event that the researchers described to them. Some of the associations were obvious matches; for example, element A was directly mapped to element B. Others were only indirectly connected to the rest of the incident; for example, element D was never directly mapped to elements A or C.

The research team found that participants were better able to uncover indirect associations (they discovered the subtle connection between items A and D) after a night’s sleep compared to staying awake. This suggests that sleep gave participants insight into the underlying event structure.

I dream my way to creativity

Thomas Edison, who helped invent the light bulb, often used daytime naps to stimulate his creativity, although he claimed to sleep no more than four hours a night.

Edison when went to sleep during the dayHe fell asleep with the ball in his hand.

As he fell asleep, his hand relaxed and the ball fell to the ground. The sound of the ball hitting the ground startled Edison awake. He and other famous thinkers salvador daliHe claimed that it was this transitional state, the moment between wakefulness and sleep, that fueled their creativity.

French scientists in 2021 Put Edison’s claim to the test. They had participants try to solve a math problem. Unknown to the participants, the problem had a secret rule that would allow them to solve the problem much faster.

After working through the problem, they had the participants fall asleep like Edison did. Each participant had a glass in their hand that they would drop when they fell asleep.

After this delay, participants were retested on the math problem. They found that participants who fell into a light sleep were better able to discover the hidden rule compared to participants who remained awake or entered deeper stages of sleep while holding the glass.

During this twilight period between wakefulness and sleep, most participants reported: hypnagogiaDream-like images common at sleep onset.

one in 2023 different group of researchers investigated whether the content of hypnagogia was associated with three creative tasks focusing on a tree theme that participants performed just before going to sleep. For example, listing all the creative, alternative uses they can think of for a tree. They found that creative problem solving increased when hypnagogic images included trees; This suggested that visualization helped them solve the problem.

So it turns out Edison was right; Falling asleep is a real creative sweet spot, and sleeping on it works.